On the face of it, the revelation that female writers dominated the UK literary bestseller lists in 2017 might seem cause for celebration, a long-overdue correction that seems especially welcome in a year that exposed systemic bias in many forms across the creative industries. According to the Bookseller’s analysis of sales, only one man, Haruki Murakami, made it into a top 10 that saw a new generation of female writers, including Sarah Perry, Naomi Alderman and Zadie Smith, displace venerable fixtures of the literary landscape such as Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan and Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro.
It’s tempting to hail this as evidence of a reinvigorated appetite among readers for women’s stories and perspectives – it’s estimated that more than two-thirds of fiction in the UK is bought by women, so it seems remarkable that it has taken us this long to vote with our wallets. Margaret Atwood earned the top slot by some distance, in part thanks to smart screen adaptations of The Handmaid’s Tale and Alias Grace, but the former had been gaining its own momentum since the ascendancy of a patriarchal US administration with its eye on curbing women’s autonomy. The success of Naomi Alderman’s The Power, which won the 2017 Baileys prize and topped Barack Obama’s books of the year list, also reflects a hunger for stories that speak to our present preoccupations, and suggests that female authors are doing a better job of addressing those concerns, perhaps because they have a keener understanding of what it means to be on the sharp end of any rise in anti-liberal feeling.
But does this really represent a dramatic shift in the recognition of female literary talent? Though the figures are heartening, especially in the context of declining sales for literary fiction, the Bookseller list was compiled, by its own admission, according to a narrow definition of “literary”, limiting its choices principally to authors who have won, or been shortlisted for, major awards.
Given the well-documented bias of the big prizes in favour of male authors – in 2015, the author Kamila Shamsie established that less than 40% of titles submitted by publishers for the Booker prize in the previous five years had been by women – this results in a very small pool of eligible names, mainly those who have already been recognised by the Women’s prize for Fiction.
Which leads us back to another perennial debate: the question of what exactly “literary” means in this context, and who gets to decide – a question itself fraught with gender prejudice. For the purposes of publishers and booksellers, more often than not it seems a label applied to any novel that doesn’t easily fit an obvious genre, with the addition of a vaguely defined value judgment about prose style and depth of ideas. When it comes to journalism and review coverage, “literary” becomes a synonym for “serious”, meaning original novels that reflect on the state of the nation and the human condition, that challenge and disconcert readers.
If you were to take at face value the discrepancy in coverage in major newspapers and journals so faithfully recorded and analysed each year by the non-profit organisation Vida, you might conclude that men are simply producing more “serious” fiction than women. But as Francine Prose pointed out 20 years ago in her essay Scent of a Woman’s Ink, this is largely to do with an inherent bias in the way men’s and women’s work is perceived. When a male author writes about a family, it’s regarded as social commentary; when a woman does, it’s a domestic tale.
It seems a fairly straightforward problem to remedy – only requiring editors, prize judges, publishers and booksellers to make more conscious choices about how they represent and promote women – and last year’s sales figures suggest, happily, that progress has been made. But the industry could still do with a more robust shake-up.
As recently as 2015, author Catherine Nichols wrote about the experience of having her first novel universally rejected, only to meet with a very different response when she submitted it under a male pseudonym. In the same year, Shamsie advocated that publishers should make 2018 the year of publishing women, and last year saw a broader acknowledgment that the literary world seriously needs to improve its commitment to diversity in terms of race.
I’d like to see an opening out of the category of “literary fiction” by publishers and prize panels; a more inclusive definition of literary worth would almost certainly result in better visibility for the many talented women writing crime, thrillers, sci-fi or romcoms. Let’s celebrate last year’s top 10, while making sure that the prominence of brilliant female writers becomes so standard as to be unremarkable.
• Stephanie Merritt writes novels under the name of SJ Parris
